Julian Assange

Julian Assange is an Australian journalist born in 1971 and is now a programmer and Internet activist, best known for his involvement with Wikileaks, a whistleblower website that is quickly becoming the United States' government's biggest threat to the legitimacy of its so-called War on Terrorism.

Wikileaks whistleblower facilitation
In 2006, Assange founded Wikileaks. Assange sits on its nine-member advisory board and is the main spokesperson for the organization. Incredibly, mirroring everyone else working for the site, Assange is an unpaid volunteer.

Assange says that Wikileaks has released more classified documents than the rest of the world press combined, but is not proud of this achievement, stating that it reflects poorly on the state of the modern press:

"That's not something I say as a way of saying how successful we are - rather, that shows you the parlous state of the rest of the media. How is it that a team of five people has managed to release to the public more suppressed information, at that level, than the rest of the world press combined? It's disgraceful."

Assange's Wikileaks is best known for its release of a video titled "Collateral Murder," which showed July 12, 2007 Baghdad airstrikes from two United States Army AH-64 Apache helicopters. During these lethal airstrikes over ten innocent civilians were murdered, hence the title given to the videos leaked to Wikileaks.

Possible manhunt underway
Though the legitimacy of the threat is questionable depending on who one asks, many believe Assange's life is under a serious threat from the government of the United States. To learn more about the attack, refer to the Wikipedia entry on it, which can be seen here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/July_12,_2007_Baghdad_airstrike

Hero of democracy
Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg opined in an interview that Assange "is serving our...democracy and serving our rule of law precisely by challenging the secrecy regulations, which are not laws in most cases, in this country." On the issue of national security considerations for the United States, Ellsberg says:

"...[A]ny serious risk to that national security is extremely low. There may be 260,000 diplomatic cables. It’s very hard to think of any of that which could be plausibly described as a national security risk. Will it embarrass diplomatic relationships? Sure, very likely—all to the good of our democratic functioning...[Assange is] obviously a very competent guy in many ways. I think his instincts are that most of this material deserves to be out. We are arguing over a very small fragment that doesn’t. He has not yet put out anything that hurt anybody’s national security."

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